Negative Railroad

I wisecracked about Obama’s Nixonian disposition a while back. Now with the manipulated birth document and the real-time rewrite of killing bin Laden, it ain’t funny anymore.

Yet another backtrack and change of tune from the White House has emerged over the fact that Obama did NOT watch the raid live and did not see the moment Osama bin Laden was shot dead. In fact the video feed stopped before US special forces stormed bin Laden's hideaway.

Motor fuel prices—gasoline, to the ordinary folk—have risen to a headline-making level. Many people who mock those with doubts about the current President’s birth status are willing believers in some shadowy conspiracy by oil speculators. Scapegoating speculators is an indication of ignorance.

The short version is that speculation may be able to rise prices for a short time. But it cannot keep prices up. That’s because the method speculators use is futures contracts, which are paper agreements to deliver some physical commodity on a given date at a given price.

Speculators can’t take physical delivery. Even if they have the money, there’s nowhere to put the oil. Our storage tanks are full. Which is a product of past speculation; people bought oil and held it thinking the price would rise. It did, and that led to more oil being delivered than was consumed.

That’s the law of supply and demand at work. When prices are rising, it inspires greater supply and reduces demand. And fills the oil storage tanks.

The current U.S. President has released his long-form birth certificate. In one stroke he has made fools of all the leftoids who have insisted for years that the public has already seen this document.

Barry was born in Hawai’i. And the race of his father is listed as African. So the current President is, indeed, African-American. That’s not black. I argue that Barack Obama is not black in any meaningful way. He was raised in Indonesia and the rainbow State of Hawai’i. He did not have the “black experience”. That identity was something he adopted as a college kid.

The genuine document also does not settle his citizenship status. His father was African, a subject of the Queen and a citizen of the U.K. His mother was too young to confer her citizenship to him, so B.H.O. II may not qualify as “Natural Born”, depending on how the law of 1961 is applied today. It could be a question for the Supreme Court.

Steven Landsberg comments on the current President’s tax return:

Now we learn that on an income of $1.7 million, the Obamas paid $450,773 in taxes, taking full advantage of the Bush tax cuts. I think it is fair to ask: If the President believes that people like him ought to be paying more, then why didn’t he pay more? There is absolutely no rule against sending in more money than you owe.

Some voice on lefty radio said that such voluntary payments wouldn’t work because the IRS isn’t set up to take in a mess of checks. Non-stop comedy on that end of the dial, I tell you.

Anyone who has read through the tax instructions would have seen that the IRS is, in fact, set up to receive what they call “voluntary contributions to reduce the public debt”. They rake in between one and two million bucks per year.

Back to the Obamas’ failure to voluntarily contribute:

The U.S. attacks on Libya have all the factions twisted around. I’ve heard the same arguments and justifications and condemnations for both ends of my radio dial. And across the intertracks.

I applaud those lefties who hold some integrity to the anti-war stance. We’re halfway through Bush’s third term. But it was a lefty who teased out the line from Obama’s speech about Libyan agents having killed Americans (a quarter-century ago) as evidence that Obama is defending U.S. interests and American lives.

Many righties and libertarian types are having difficulty with the newly-minted Obama doctrine, which seems to be call for U.S. military action when human rights are grossly violated. So, why aren’t we bombing Iran, Saudia Arabia, and Myanmar (or Barney Frank’s apartment)?

The fascist model embraces state control of industry while maintaining private ownership of industry. Favorite corporations are allowed favored treatment under the rules. Granting special status—and the profits that follow—is the major means by which government gets corporate management to go along.

It works like this:

Sarah Palin’s Facebook column in response to this week’s State of the Union speech is excellent. Not merely because she argues from a perspective I embrace, but also because it is simply good writing. To whatever level the words are hers and not her copywriters’, and to whatever level she can use the same kind of language without a script, she is a great communicator.

Twenty percent of the public would never agree. In advertising, one of the commandments is to speak to your audience. That implies that your message doesn’t have to be tailored to people not in your audience. Political talking heads like to chatter about how rhetoric might influence the middle people. But their analysis usually takes the form of pointing out how the message will be regarded by staunch opponents. That’s irrelevant.

Of course the people in the middle aren’t on board with Palin’s arguments. Not yet. They’re the undecided, the swing voters. They’re sitting out in suburbia waiting to be persuaded.

Read the whole thing:

The current President has claimed a college education should be available to every American kid. And he says he has signed into law changes that help college become more affordable.

But really, he’s just bought support from Big Ed by making sure tuition stays high while making student debt nearly permanent.

H/T: Vox Popoli

As a nice contrast to the factional finger-pointing today’s assassinations murders killings have inspired, Shannon Love predicts the shooter’s psychological profile:

The shooter’s outward and inward life has been dominated by the disconnect between his perception of his own worth in the world and his real accomplishments.

He believes himself more intelligent, more knowledgeable and more skilled than he actually is. He is incapable of accepting responsibility for the consequences of his own foolish actions. This exaggerated sense of his own worth leads him expect far greater rewards in all areas of life than he actually receives. He does not get the jobs, pay, authority, awards, social circle, romantic interest and overall social status he believes that he justly deserves.

But for the grace of god (or a fawning culture that awarded undeserved strokes), Obama would have shot at Reagan. Or Cheney.

Anyhoo, Love continues:

I’ve been listening to lefty radio semi-regularly for a couple of months. It’s quite a paranoid party they have going on. And the election this week has them really off the rails. I find the endless carping about corporations [shiver!] kind of amusing. And god bless them, I know their hearts are even in the right place sometimes.

But this afternoon I heard a couple of assertions that put the joke to the claim that they’re the reality-based community.

• Barack Obama is not a Progressive. He’s a moderate, centrist Democrat.
• In the 1950s, Obama would have been a Republican.

Wow. Just wow.

Cobb makes a general cultural distinction that I’ve been applying to Obama for several years:

I know my kids ain't black. And when it comes to their adulthood, they won't need to be. They're brown - like the zillions in Africa, India and South and Central America. That's a good enough sample, and it's only skin color. They can't be black like me because my blackness was born of the times, not an essential, inescapable box, but a response to a condition. But so much of who I am is locked into that alternatively golden and grim experience.

The times and conditions Cobb refers to I think are well-illustrated in the beginning pages of Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. The author—who looks brown due to South Asian heritage—meets a gang leader in the stairwell of a Chicago housing project:

Tam’s watching reruns:

So the gaffe-prone alpha male Texan with a controversial service record, view of the government as benevolent rescuer at home, and an aggressive foreign policy is out, and has been replaced with the skinny, cigarette-smoking, paranoid political apparatchik who promised us peace with honor and is obsessed with the enemies out to destroy him.

Next time we recast this series, the writers will probably eliminate the cigarettes. And that is the only part I like.

Last week’s peaking hullabaloo over the Koranflagration and the Hamasque prompted Maxed Out Mama to step outside of her usual economic territory:

[B]y making, quite literally, a federal case of it, they have all conveyed the global message that rioting, burning, stabbing and any other type of barbaric Islamic behavior justify the suspension of the US Constitution when it comes to Muslims. In short, very prominent members of our executive are attempting to, de facto, suspend the constitution in such a way that it must inevitably have given the greatest surge of joy to violent Islamic factions since 9/11.

In 2003, Osama bin Laden wrote:

Another instance of the failed promise of a post-racial America under President Barry “The Mutt” Obama:

After an emotional meeting Thursday night where neighbors split along racial lines over whether an off-leash dog site should be built at Martin Luther King Memorial Park in south Minneapolis, the Park Board president said other options should be sought.

…much of the debate centered on whether the dog park would dishonor King, the slain civil rights leader.

It’s just an amenity in a City park, not a political statement. And dogs set the standard for judging each other not by the color of their fur, but by the content of their…um, “character”.

Last night the current President took credit for executing a plan devised under the previous President to transfer control of Iraq to Iraqis. He did not mention that the 50,000 troops still in country have the same weapons and take the same risks as the day before, that “the end of combat operations” is an adjustment of administrative label instead of a marked shift in situation.

Barry also did not utter the word “win”. He did manage to say “victory” once, in a non-specific sense:

In an age without surrender ceremonies, we must earn victory through the success of our partners and the strength of our own nation.

TJIC shows his best form ripping the current President and Big Media:

So why, exactly, is this being spun as an Obama victory?

Measured as a percentage of total economic output — the gauge that economists say is most meaningful — the deficit would be 10 percent of gross domestic product… well below the records set during World War II.

Fascinating!

The deficit was 25% when we assembled the largest armed forces in the history of human civilization, and conquered two continents at once.

…and with Obama’s socialist experiments, we’ve only run up a 10% deficit!

That is news – he’s doing a heck of ajob!

Just go read it.

You'll never, ever hear Obama say "I want my life back!".

Quoted from: a comment on a photo of the current President playing golf on Father’s Day.

My anarchist nature is loving the transparent collapse of the established order under Mr. Obama:

Nobody likes the bumbling crony capitalists at BP, least of all countermoonbats, considering that they gave more money to Comrade Obama than to any other candidate in the past 20 years and were lobbying to enrich themselves at the price of our country's ruin through the Cap & Tax conspiracy. But the rule of law applies to everyone, even lizards low enough to crawl into bed with Obama and then get knifed by him. Like Congressman Joe Barton, I find it alarming in the extreme that the President of the USA can exploit an accident to shake down a corporation for a $20 billion slush fund.